Concentrix bolts on Minacs to add industry depth and value

· Contact Centres,Consolidation,Concentrix

Not to be outdone by the surge in acquisition activity in the contact centre space (EGS and WestCorp by Alorica, TP/Aegis, Blackstone/Mphasis from HP, and Serco/Intelenet …), Concentrix (itself a recent $505m buy-out from IBM’s customer care business) has gobbled up its smaller competitor, Minacs, stealing it from under the noses of rival Convergys at the 11th hour.

Concentrix’s aim is to become the greatest customer engagement company and this acquisition is a step in that direction. However, the question on customers’ lips is less about the pure numbers play (91k seats, 125+ locations, 25+ countries across 6 continents) and “a complementary footprint with deep domain knowledge”, but more about, “how will this $420m shopping trip impact me?”

With a definite “additive” flavour to the acquisition (minimal overlap and consolidation expectation) and closely aligned cultures (very much “by design” across both entities), this appears to be a match made in customer service/contact centre heaven.

Recent contact centre customer feedback has pointed to a greater need for a “value-add” component to their engagements, moving beyond the simple transactional and driving and supporting an impact on the wider business operations and even revenue generating capabilities of their operations. As such having the ability to offer a positive customer experience (service quality now the top critical concern for contact centre managers) and wider customer lifecycle capabilities through multiple channels are starting to outweigh pure language, price, technology and location arguments.

Thus, the Minacs assets, with a strong play in high-value offerings such as telematics, IoT and marketing optimisation, appear to be a natural opportunity to gain a foothold in this space, supported by the scale and footprint that Concentrix currently enjoys. From that perspective, of greatest interest will be the analytics angle (a key investment area for contact centre management in 2016) and how the Minacs offerings and proprietary platform will fit into/play within the Concentrix customer world.

However, regardless of Minacs’ acquiring party, the standard integration challenges for such large marriages still remain … ensuring that the culture and capabilities across both entities become one (operating as two separate entities for a period should allow for a period of assessment, alignment and integration) and safeguarding leadership and key staff retention (the installment of Anil Bhalla into the Concentrix senior leadership team and a number of other senior level role guarantees should provide some form of short-term stability)

As a customer, though, one will need to ensure that the combined entities still focus on and commit to existing engagement and delivery, but do not expect substantial immediate changes (3 months of parallel operations pre-rebranding), especially across some of the more innovative offerings.

Now that this transaction has closed, we would suggest garnering short-term quality commitments, with a view to considering adoption of some of the broader combined entity’s offerings post a minimum 3 to 6 month settling-in timeframe.

For additional information or to discuss how TRA can work with you to support your technology go-to-market, customer engagement and channel programmes please contact Jens (+61 429 796 951 or jens@techresearch.asia) or the TRA team at www.techresearch.asia